The AI race is not only about who builds the biggest model or spends the most money. If it were, Europe would already be out of contention. The more interesting question is whether nations can retain meaningful control over the technologies that will shape their economies and public services. On that score, the plucky Brits and the fearsome French appear to be making progress. New investment in sovereign compute, domestic chip design, frontier models and industrial AI suggests a shift from aspiration to execution. They remain minnows beside Silicon Valley’s giants. But they are no longer standing still while the future is built elsewhere.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

RCR Top Stories

UK shows AI mettle: The UK government’s £1.1bn AI plan anchors a new compute strategy, including a £750m supercomputer, targeted support for startups, almost £4m from AMD and Nebius, plus photonics, frontier models, and industrial AI.

Optical AI spend: Spending patterns in the optical market are increasingly shaped by hyperscalers rather than traditional telecom operators – says Ciena, Nokia, and Dell’Oro on an RCR webinar.

Nordic AI boost: atNorth tells RCR that rising demand for AI, HPC, and cloud workloads is supporting plans for its 350MW NOR01 campus in Norway, which is designed to support rack densities of up to 1MW.

Scale-testing LLMs: Enterprises must validate LLM performance, security, and cost efficiency at scale. Testing under realistic workloads is essential to ensure reliable, secure, and economically sustainable customer-facing AI systems.

Networks matter, too: AI is constrained not just by chips but by infrastructure, from storage and energy to connectivity bottlenecks. As data centers expand, the weakest link shifts, threatening to limit AI’s future scale and performance.

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Beyond the Headlines

Inference chip: AMD’s MI350P is its first PCIe Instinct since 2022. It’s a 600W, air-cooled card with 144 GB of HBM3E and 4.6 PFLOPS, aimed at on-prem AI inference.

French shrinkage: Telcos in France have agreed a deal to split SFR, the country’s second operator, between Bouygues, Orange, and Iliad. The transaction boosts their commercial scale, investment capacity, and sovereignty ambitions.

AI, down under: Big news in the subsea sector, as Telstra has a new land-and-sea swap deal with Google to pump AI workloads in and out of Australia, along the former’s fiber backbone and the latter’s pipes into the Asia Pacific region.

Network bottleneck: Marvell and Nvidia execs confirm what the telco industry has said for ages – that AI constraints are shifting from compute and memory to connectivity, where optical networking and interconnects are the next bottleneck.

Defense comms: Defense comms is about more than resilient links, satellite comms, private 5G, and edge AI. It is about building an interoperable, trusted, and continuously validated comms ecosystem that can operate across domain.

What We’re Reading

BT joins Glasswing: BT is to join Anthropic’s Project Glasswing with a view to help critical infrastructure providers secure their systems with frontier AI. Membership will help its strengthen cyber security for the country, it said.

Mining private 5G: Ericsson has an alliance with machinery maker Epiroc to help mining companies accelerate automation, digitalization, and operational transformation. The partnership has private 5G at its heart.

DDoS protection: Nokia has launched a security automation system for DDoS protection for telcos, and others. The new Genome Shield fights residential proxy botnets, which now comprise 200 million compromised devices worldwide.

Critical LEO comms: Finnish telco Voimatel is to integrate Eutelsat’s LEO services into its solutions, combining satellite and terrestrial connectivity for critical networks. The solution will deliver resilient and redundant comms for industries.

Latest Wi-Fi review: Ookla has new figures about the use of 6 GHz for Wi-Fi and availability of CPE for Wi-Fi 7, and finds: Singapore has the,most Wi-Fi 7 users, but the tech is nascent, and North America leads on 6 GHz, but the picture is blurry.

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